Building a Reddit extension solo — how I kept the scope from sprawling

FIFI — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 07:26:20 +0000

I've spent the last stretch building FIFI, a Chrome extension that surfaces buried high-engagement comment exchanges in Reddit threads — the ones that get lost because Reddit's ranking rewards upvotes, not conversation.

Solo dev, frontend and backend both. The hardest part wasn't the escalation-scoring logic — it was resisting feature creep. Every "wouldn't it be cool if" idea (persistent feeds, save-for-later, cross-thread digests) got weighed against one question: does this turn FIFI into an inbox?

The whole point is that it's a tool you invoke when you want signal, not something that persists and demands to be cleared. A few features got cut for that reason alone, even when they were technically easy to add.

It's live now, free tier + $4.99/mo premium.
Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkcsLApUTIc

Curious how other solo builders handle this — what's your rule for saying no to a feature that's easy to build but wrong for the product?

DEV Community: FIFI

Building a Reddit extension solo — how I kept the scope from sprawling